Sunday, 15 September 2013

Microsexuality

"Arse!"

Mane's little brother, satisfied with the rude word he'd just said, handed the microphone over to my friend-who-is-a-teacher. Under the rules of the game that we'd just made up, you had to say a rude word beginning with the letter assigned according to the order in which we sat. The more obscure the better. (I wanted to go for "Quetzalcoatlus". I know it's not a rude word, but I know how to spell it. And I'd been previously going for archaic ones, like "Zounds!", so I wanted to be impressive.)My friend-who-is-a-teacher raised the microphone to her mouth, about to utter her obscenity ("Bollocks!"), when Mane's brother suddenly realised he had something else to say, and lunged for the microphone.Crack. Everyone in the room winced as the microphone audibly hit my friend-who-is-a-teacher directly in the face. "Ow," was her slightly muted response.There was a pause lasting a few seconds before the young raver pitched in. "What's that, some kind of sexual thing?" he suggested.

Laughter broke the silence. "It's hardly that impressive a donkey punch," I pointed out. And so the game continued on, with Mane's girlfriend taking the mike and suggesting "clunch". At which point people started looking through dictionaries.

*

Mane was playing bagatelle (a game similar to pinball, only much more rustic) by the time our game reached him at letter Y, and he was doing rather well. Although it's very difficult to aim in bagatelle (as we all found out), he was rather hoping to hit the target which allows reclamation of all your lost balls. It was his final ball, and he vowed to fire it at the same time as he thought of his rude word.It was a masterpiece. Just as his ball arced gracefully into the correct target, Mane thought of the perfect word."Yoghurt! It's a rude word, because you can put it all over... oh, my balls!"This time the stunned silence didn't come before the laughter. All that was left afterwards, perhaps, was the response.